President Reagan will soon be the target of a sophisticated campaign to persuade him to open SALT III talks with the Soviet Union. The real purpose of such pressures, of course, is to make sure that the United States does not build the military weapons necessary to catch up with those of the Soviet Union.
One of the cleverest fountainheads of disarmament propaganda is the Pugwash Conferences, attended by an elite gathering of international scientists from both the West and Communist bloc nations. The most recent of the thirty Pugwash conferences was held last August 20-25 in Breukelen, the Netherlands.
The Pugwash scientists present papers which are all variations on a single theme. The world faces the threat of “a major and catastrophic nuclear war before the end of this century,” and therefore the solution is strategic arms limitation agreements and the reduction of military expenditures.
Of course, the fallacy in that argument is that Pugwashers promote arms reductions only by the United States. They have provided the esoteric underpinning for an ideology which rationalizes the United States’ continually reducing its weaponry at the same time that the Soviet Union continually increases its arsenal.
Are the Pugwashers merely a few offbeat radicals, so far outside the mainstream of American policy that they can be ignored? Not at all. Their importance was once explained by a Russian participant like this: “I heard that the Pugwash Conferences are officially unofficial, but now I see they are unofficially official.”
The godfather of the Pugwashers was millionaire Soviet apologist Cyrus Eaton, who provided the initial financing and hosted the first conference in 1954 at his estate at Pugwash, Nova Scotia. The original invitations were issued by Lord Bertrand Russell (best known for coining the slogan “rather Red than dead”), and the later participants were assembled by Dr. Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists, the only U.S. publication to report on the conferences.
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The most important of the 30 Pugwash Conferences was the one held in Moscow in November-December 1960, attended by Dr. Jerome Wiesner and others who, within a few weeks thereafter, became high policy-making officials of the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. They designed the policy of U.S. unilateral disarmament under the cover of claiming that this is the key to peace.
It was clear to many people even then that the Pugwash goals spell defeat and humiliation for America. They were the group about whom President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961: “Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Unfortunately, U.S. military policy did become “the captive of a scientific technological elite.” That policy was spelled out in such documents of the early 1960s as The Liberal Papers (a paperback book sponsored by James Roosevelt and 35 other Democratic Congressmen which endorsed unilateral disarmament and “rather Red than dead”), Dean Rusk’s State Department Publication 7277 (calling for the three-stage abolition | of our Army, Navy, Air Force, and nuclear weapons), and disarmament studies tax-funded by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency such as the notorious “Phoenix Study” (which even suggested “unification” of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.).
The Pugwash unilateral disarmament ideology was remarkably successful. The nuclear weapons statistics that came out in the SALT II debates prove that the Soviets have many more missiles and submarines than we have, that they are far more modern and powerful than ours, and that the decision to abandon our nuclear superiority was made in the 1960s and carried out by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
The Holland Pugwash Conference last year laid down the updated propaganda line: Push for immediate talks on SALT III. Work toward a “non-first-use pledge on nuclear weapons” (which would be observed only by the U.S.). Argue against all civil defense. Discredit the concept that “peace is achieved through preparation for war.”
President Reagan should name an experienced realist, such as Lt. Gen. Edward J. Rowny (Ret.), to be in charge of Resisting Temptations to make SALT Concessions to Russia. Then we should begin the task of catching up to the Soviet Union in strategic weapons.
